Advanced Systems Teach (ASysT) Lab

The ASysT lab is located on the ground floor of the Computer
Science & Engineering Building (K17).

It is organised around 64-bit computers, the U4600, based on a
100 MHz MIPS R4700 processor. (Yes, these are a little old now,
but they still provide an excellent platform for teaching and OS
development.) The U4600 was developed by Kevin Elphinstone
and Dave
Johnson. It is especially designed to allow experimentation
with operating systems code.

U4600 technical details

The U4600s are based on a locally designed and manufactured ATX
form factor motherboard. The motherboard features:

An R4700 CPU, running at 100Mhz.

Up to 512 MB of EDO RAM. (Most machines run with 8MB).

4 PCI slots running at 33 MHz.

2 serial ports.

512K ROM containing the PMON boot monitor.

A 2K NVRAM and real time clock module.

How to use

When you compile your project it will produce a boot image
which is placed in the /tftpboot directory of the
machine you are currently using.

To boot this image on the u4600 you will first need to start
the console program which allows you to access the
serial console. Eg:

% console ttyS0

The u4600's have two serial ports, so you will probably want to
start a console for both of these (ttyS0 and
ttyS1).

After you have started the console program you should power on
your u4600. The boot loader should startup and print data to one
of you consoles. Eg: